Are you ready for some football? Amazon.comAMZN in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position is. A few months ago, it agreed to pay the National Football League $50 million for streaming rights to 10 Thursday Night Football games starting on Sep. 28. That’s five times what Twitter paid for a similar deal last season. For now, streaming is a mere sideshow to television in sports. The Thursday games will air simultaneously on the NFL Network, and on either CBS or NBC, which each pays $225 million a year for five of them. But Amazon’s encroachment should give media investors pause. Viewership trends in television are weak, and they’re worse without sports. Whereas TV networks own many of their scripted hits, they rent sports. Wisely, they have locked up rights for years to come, albeit at rich prices. As those rights come due, the networks could enter an unwinnable bidding war with Amazon (ticker: AMZN), Facebook (FB), and AlphabetGOOGLGOOGL in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position (GOOGL). “Winter is coming,” says New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, borrowing a grim refrain from the HBO hit Game of Thrones. “The post-sports world will be ugly for television.”

Winter might already be here for cable networks that lack the programming might of the broadcast bigs. Last Monday, Discovery Communications (DISCA), which owns the Discovery Channel and TLC networks, said it will buy HGTV and Food Network owner Scripps Networks InteractiveSNI in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position (SNI) for $11.9 billion. Both companies also reported disappointing financial results amid subscriber declines. “This deal combined with [second quarter] results suggests how tough the cable network business has become,” wrote Wells Fargo Securities analyst Marci Ryvicker. In a presentation, Discovery touted the combined company’s potential for cost savings and overseas expansion. But its shares finished the week down 11%, capping a 25% slide over two years. Scripps shareholders are getting a deal premium exceeding 30%.

FOR NOW, the major broadcast networks—CBS (CBS); ABC, owned by Walt Disney (DIS); NBC, owned by ComcastMCSA in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position (CMCSA); and Fox, owned by Twenty-First Century Fox (FOX)—are better positioned than cable. (Twenty-First Century Fox and News CorpWS.AU in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position(NWSA), publisher of Barron’s, shared common ownership until 2013.) As must-carry channels, they have negotiated for rising fees from cable operators, while raising prices for advertising, which is helping to offset declines in cable subscribers and ratings. All have large in-house production operations that can create shows for the new crop of online streaming services. Some have fee-based streaming platforms of their own, or plans to launch them. Others are part of media conglomerates with a hand in theme parks, cable-TV distribution, and more. But the protective moat of the cable bundle is already weakening, and sports rights could be next. Before that happens, valuations for the group could come down to reflect the rising risk.

Sports are the biggest draw on television. Among last year’s 50 most-watched telecasts, 44 were football, basketball, baseball, or the Olympics. Sports viewers are also particularly attractive to advertisers. They skew young, and thus have plenty of years ahead to spend on their favorite brands, and they like to watch games live, which means they catch more commercials instead of zipping through them on their digital video recorders. TV networks have increased the number of hours devoted to sports by 160% since 2005. At the same time, traditional television is losing its reach. Over the past five years, viewership among teens and young millennials (ages 18 to 24), including delayed viewing on DVRs, but not online streaming, has plummeted by more than 40%, according to Nielsen data. Among older millennials (25 to 34) and Gen Xers (35 to 49), it is down 28% and 13%, respectively. Only over-50s are sticking with their clickers. Some of those lost younger viewers are watching traditional TV shows on new platforms, including smartphone apps for shows, networks, and cable carriers. But many are spending their screen time with services like NetflixFLX in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position(NFLX), which now boasts more U.S. subscribers than all cable carriers combined. If TV networks are struggling to remain relevant, TV sets are not. As of March, according to Nielsen, 23% of U.S. households had an Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku device for streaming movies and shows through their televisions, up from 19% in June 2016. Another 11% of households stream to their TVs using other devices, including smartphones and tablets; 29% own TVs with built-in apps for streaming; and 42% have videogame consoles that double as TV streaming devices. Across these devices, streaming apps are proliferating. AppleAAPL in Your ValueYour ChangeShort position (AAPL) says it will add Amazon Prime Video service to Apple TV this year, while Facebook (FB) is working on a video app for Apple and Amazon devices.

SPORTS HAVE NOT BEEN IMMUNE to viewership declines, although one man has made recent trends difficult to read: Donald Trump. Football ratings tumbled leading up to Election Day, but stabilized afterward. Basketball ratings fell long after Election Day, although they were even with their level two years ago. Baseball was solid. Trump’s antics seem to have made news more intriguing than sports at times, with the notable exception of the Chicago Cubs winning their first World Series in more than a century. There were other factors at play.

Football, for example, faced controversies over a string of player protests during the singing of the national anthem, and over mounting evidence that the game causes brain injuries. One thing is certain: TV viewership would be much lower without sports. For most of the major networks, it would be declining faster, too, according to NYU’s Galloway (see chart, “Big Fans”). A spokesman for Nielsen declined to comment. Nielsen has been working to add new ways of measuring audiences across traditional and digital platforms, including YouTube and Hulu, but for now, ratings are a source of frequent dispute. According to a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, a collection of advertising concerns, overall television ratings have fallen 33% in four years, while ad prices have climbed 20%. Some networks call statements like that an effort to negotiate advertising tabs lower. TV HAS FACED spiraling costs for sports rights for decades. Upstart Fox bid aggressively for games in the 1990s to help secure its place as one of the major networks. ESPN, easily the most expensive channel in typical cable bundles, at more than $7 a month per subscriber, has used its rising financial might to secure a growing slate of professional games. Sports pundits say it overpays for programming, relative to the major networks, but Disney has said it is happy with its contracts.For some sports, and some particular games, TV has paid dearly to protect its rights for many years. ESPN and Time Warner’s WX in Your ValueYour ChangeShort positionTNT hold National Basketball Association rights that extend through 2025 under a combined $25 billion, nine-year deal. CBS and Time Warner (TWX) are together paying $10.8 billion for “March Madness” college basketball games through 2024, plus another $8.8 billion to extend through 2032. Other deals are shorter. CBS, Fox, and NBC have Sunday football games through 2022 under a nine-year deal that costs $27.9 billion combined. Thursday night games are up for bid after the coming season. Such high prices have led investors to wonder whether TV rights for sports are a bubble waiting to pop. The average cable subscriber now pays more than $20 a month for sports. Not everyone watches sports, of course, which is part of the reason subscribers have been cancelling service. RBC Capital Markets estimates that cable’s subscriber base will decline by 3% this year, which would be about twice the rate of decline seen last year. TV’S SPORTS PROBLEM amounts to this: If last year’s disappointing viewership is the start of a secular decline—because viewers are too busy, or the games or seasons are too long, or the entertainment alternatives are better, or what have you—then TV has bet big, right at the top of the market. On the other hand, if sports fans stay as glued to their games as ever, TV could soon have to compete with a crop of new rights bidders on financial steroids.Alphabet, which owns YouTube and Google, and Facebook, which owns Instagram, are a mirror image of broadcast TV. Their audiences are vast and growing. Consider: Various Super Bowls dominate the list of the most-watched U.S. telecasts ever. But there are more than 40 YouTube videos that have each been watched 10 times more than any Super Bowl. Advertisers are quickly shifting dollars online. Digital ad spending passed advertising outlays for TV for the first time last year. This year, the gap will widen to $10 billion—with $83 billion for digital, and $73 billion for TV, according to industry forecaster eMarketer. By 2021, the gap could be more than $50 billion. And while TV is in a spending race for content, YouTube and Facebook get free content created by their users.Meanwhile, Amazon seems to be trying—and failing—to spend money as fast at it makes it. This year, it is likely to generate $10.5 billion in free cash, more than any television network’s parent company. And Amazon’s free cash flow could triple by 2020. By then, Wall Street predicts, the big four TV networks and their parent companies—with their theme parks, movies, and other ventures—will generate a combined $30 billion in free cash flow. Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon are seen combining for more than $100 billion. ALL THREE DOT-COMS have a strong and growing interest in video. Amazon offers a subscription video service as a giveaway to customers who pay $10.99 a month, or $99 a year, for its Amazon Prime shopping service with free two-day shipping—but that giveaway service won three Oscars this year. Alphabet says that YouTube viewing time on televisions has nearly doubled over the past year. It has a fledgling subscription service called YouTube Red and a new live TV package called YouTube TV. Last quarter, it unveiled six new original shows with stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Hart. Facebook on its latest earnings call touted video as a growth and investment priority. “Video is the most engaging experience that we can offer,” said finance chief David Wehner. User videos are the core focus for now, but “there’s opportunities for semiprofessional and professional content,” he said.

If Netflix has gotten limited mention here, it is only because its popularity in streaming greatly exceeds its spending power for now. The company isn’t expected to generate positive free cash flow for at least five years. There is much more to producing sports on TV than simply paying for rights. The Emmys have 41 categories for sports, including play-by-play, studio host, camera work, and audio. Local-market and advertising expertise matters, too. But scripted programming is complicated, and the streamers seem to have gotten the hang of that, judging by their growth rates. All of this means that media investors should take care to favor only companies that look capable of managing a future sports cliff. Comcast has the strongest hand of the bunch. It owns the only major cable carrier that has added video subscribers of late. The carriers, in general, are well positioned to deal with cord-cutting, because it’s something of a misnomer. Customers do without their video signals, but they become all the more dependant on the cords that bring their broadband internet service. Cable carriers take advantage of this by bumping up the price on broadband for subscribers who cancel their video. As a result, Comcast can prosper for years to come, regardless of who wins the war for viewers. Meanwhile, theme park profits are galloping higher after years of spending on expansions. CBS IS MUCH CLOSER to being a show-business pure play, but it has led in television ratings for years, which helps when the company pitches cable carriers for higher fees. The company also has streaming services of its own in Showtime Anytime and CBS All Access. The valuation is attractive. Whereas Comcast sells for close to 20 times this year’s earnings forecast, CBS goes for less than 15 times. Wall Street predicts 16% earnings-per-share growth next year, but estimates have been gradually coming down. We recommended the stock in a cover story a year ago (“Will CBS Buy Viacom?” Sept. 24). It has returned 26% since then, compared with 16% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Disney has heavy sports exposure through ESPN, the company’s biggest earner. But it also owns a flourishing theme-park business and has one of the best win records in the movie business in recent years. All of that is worth a premium price, but the stock already carries one, at 18 times projected earnings for calendar 2017, and earnings growth has recently slowed. Disney has plans for a streaming service for ESPN that will bypass cable, and has a stake in Major League Baseball’s streaming arm, BAMTech. Fox’s CEO, James Murdoch, has told analysts that the company could offer a direct-to-customer model in the future. For now, Fox, like Comcast, Disney, and Time Warner, has a stake in the streaming service Hulu. By 2020, predicts eMarketer, Hulu will have 35.8 million subscribers, behind Amazon Prime Video, with 96.5 million and Netflix, with 139 million.

The guns of August are cocked and ready. Donald Trump is wondering aloud whether to fire his attorney-general, Jeffrey Sessions. Coming from the top, such speculation can only end in Mr Sessions’ departure. The US president is also musing about who will rid him of the troublesome special counsel, Robert Mueller. That, too, must eventually end in Mr Mueller’s exit. Both are a question of timing. My hunch is August. But it could be months away. Or tomorrow.The point is that Mr Trump will do what he must to block the investigation. His latest escalation was triggered by Mr Mueller’s decision to broaden his probe to include the Trump Organisation’s financial dealings with Russia. Washington gossips have speculated that Vladimir Putin possesses lurid tapes of Mr Trump. The idea of such “kompromat” might ignite our prurience. But it always seemed far-fetched. In contrast, there is ample cause to scrutinise Mr Trump’s history of business dealings with Russian counterparts.The further Mr Mueller progresses, the more Mr Trump panics. His reactions betray his motives. No reasonable observer could conclude that Mr Trump is willing to open his books. Having refused to release his tax returns, he risks a constitutional crisis to stop US law enforcement officers from looking into his business dealings. The two are obviously connected. Sooner or later, serious investigators end up following the money. Mr Mueller is nothing if not thorough. Mr Trump is nothing if not ruthless.It can only result in a collision. The question is whether the US republic can walk away unscathed. Comparisons with Watergate are often facile. But Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in October 1973 is too pressing a parallel to ignore. Elliot Richardson, his attorney-general, resigned after he had refused to dismiss the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Then the deputy attorney-general, William Ruckelshaus, stepped down for the same reason. Only on the third try could Nixon find an official pliable enough to do his bidding. That man was Robert Bork.Mr Trump faces the same problem. Having recused himself from anything related to the Russia investigations, Mr Sessions does not have the authority to fire Mr Mueller. But his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, is unlikely to do so either. It was he who appointed Mr Mueller after having fired James Comey, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in May. Mr Trump is thus busy smearing both Mr Sessions and Mr Rosenstein. He is preparing his base for the purge to come. Say what you like about Mr Trump, but he is easier to read than a traffic light.It is at this point a constitutional crisis would erupt. America’s founding fathers created a system based on laws, not men. But it is down to people to uphold the system. In theory, there is nothing stopping Mr Trump from doing whatever he likes. Most constitutional lawyers say you cannot indict a sitting president — even if he has repeatedly obstructed justice. If Mr Mueller were sacked, in other words, no court would reinstate him. The same applies to Mr Sessions, and as far down the chain as Mr Trump cared to go.The US republic’s ultimate safety net is public opinion. So far most Americans are not inflamed by the Russia investigations. It is hard to blame them. People in Washington are obsessed by the day-by-day dramatic twists. But most ordinary Americans lack the time to absorb the endless waves of detail. Who cares if Mr Sessions held undeclared meetings with the Russian ambassador during the campaign? Politics is a dirty game and the people who throw mud are usually covered in it themselves.The other safety net is impeachment. Unless public opinion turns sharply against Mr Trump, a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to act. Nixon had no place to hide after it was revealed he had taped his Oval Office conversations. The Saturday Night Massacre was his last-ditch attempt to stop the tapes from falling into public hands. It was only after they were released that a critical number of Republicans turned against Nixon. That was during a far less partisan era than today.Ironically, one thing protecting Mr Sessions is that he is more Trumpian than Mr Trump. In the past few months he has been busy putting “America First” into practice by stepping up deportations of illegal immigrants. This has won him friends in outlets such as Breitbart News. That is why Mr Trump’s attacks focus on Mr Sessions’ failure to prosecute Hillary Clinton. Mr Trump needs the base to demand Mr Sessions’ head because of his supposed softness towards “crooked Hillary”. As I say, you can read Mr Trump through a blindfold.

North Korea said its
leader Kim Jong Un was weighing whether to strike the US Pacific territory of
Guam, just hours after Donald Trump vowed to meet threats made by North Korea
“with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

The comments, released via
North Korea’s state news agency, appear to escalate a dangerous game of chicken
as the US struggles to bring the nuclear aspirant and its rapidly developing
missile programme into line.

The Korean People’s Army
said the strike plan would be “put into practice in a multi-current and
consecutive way any moment” once the supreme leader had made a decision about
targeting the small island territory of fewer than 200,000 people, which lies
south of Japan.“

The KPA strategic force is
now carefully examining the operational plan for making an enveloping fire at
the areas around Guam with medium-to-long-range strategic ballistic rocket
Hwasong-12 in order to contain the US major military bases on Guam, including
the Andersen Air Force base,” said the KPA, referring to a missile it first
tested in May.

US strategic bombers
“threaten and blackmail [North Korea] through their frequent visits to the sky
above South Korea”, the KPA added. “It is a daydream for the US to think that
its mainland is an invulnerable heavenly kingdom.”

President Trump had
earlier told reporters that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the
United States”, following reports Pyongyang had cracked one of the final
technological challenges in nuclear missile design by successfully
miniaturising the atomic warhead.

The intelligence
assessment, reported by The Washington Post, underlines the grave threat that
the Trump administration has spent the past seven months striving to stem.North
Korea best not make any more threats to the United States . . . they will be
met by fire, fury and, frankly, power the likes of which this world has never
seen before President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump’s comments drew
criticism from political opponents, who accused him of baiting the paranoid
North Korean regime under Mr Kim, who predicates his rule on his missile
programme and threats to the US, which it frames as an imperial aggressor.“

I take exception to the
president’s comments because you [have] got to be sure that you can do what you
say you’re going to do,” John McCain, Republican senator and chairman of the
armed services committee, told reporters, adding it brings the US “closer to
confrontation”.

Mr Trump’s comments carry
an eerie echo of those made by President Harry Truman after he told the
American public in 1945 that the US had dropped the world’s first atomic bomb
on Hiroshima following Japan’s failure to meet a US ultimatum: “If they do not
now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of
which has never been seen on this earth.”

Chuck Schumer, the
Democratic leader in the Senate, said: “We need to be firm and deliberate with
North Korea, but reckless rhetoric is not a strategy to keep America safe.”

James Mattis, the US
defence secretary, and senior Pentagon officials have warned of the cost of war
with North Korea: US allies South Korea and Japan are within range of the
Pyongyang’s arsenal of nuclear, conventional and biochemical weapons.The report
that US intelligence believes North Korea has miniaturised nuclear weapons so
it can fit them to its growing arsenal of medium and long-range missiles, which
are at various stages of development, will only add to concerns. It said the
Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the 17 agencies that make up the US
intelligence community, made the initial assessment. The report also says the
US believes North Korea now has up to 60 nuclear weapons.

The Office of the Director
of National Intelligence, which heads the US intelligence community, declined
to comment and the DIA did not immediately respond to requests.

“We’re not sure if [the
assessment] reflects the views of the entire intelligence community,” said
Bruce Klingner, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst at The Heritage
Foundation. In 1999, he predicted North Korea would be able to hit the US by
2015 and has previously warned that the US regularly under-assessed the threat
from North Korea.

“There seems to have been
a tendency over the years to downplay the threat given repeated failures [of]
missile launches, with the presumption that North Korea couldn’t accomplish
what other nations have done,” said Mr Klingner. He said the autocratic state
was regularly “referred to as the hardest of the hard targets in the
intelligence community”.

The US assessment goes
further than a warning by Japan on Tuesday, which only went as far as
concluding that it was “possible” that North Korea had already achieved the
miniaturisation of nuclear weapons.

Robert Litwak, director of
international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, who has studied North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, said the country
had taken “another major step” that would allow it to threaten the US mainland.
“

North Korea now is on the
cusp of a nuclear breakout but there is time to alter the trajectory of that
technological advance — it took the US years to master these complex and
integrated technologies and that creates a space, a potential political space,
for diplomacy,” he said.

North Korea tested its
first intercontinental ballistic missile — the Hwasong-14 — last month, which
is believed to have the range to reach at least Alaska and possibly as far as
the US east coast, escalating the threat further and prompting Washington to co-ordinate
a global response.

Mr Trump tweeted earlier
on Tuesday that “after many years of failure, countries are coming together to
finally address the dangers posed by North Korea”.

Rex Tillerson, US
secretary of state, is seeking to stitch a broad coalition of Asian countries
against the North Korean threat on his trip to Manila, while also raising the
prospect of talks should North Korea forgo its nuclear ambitions.

The US also secured
support at the weekend from both China and Russia for unprecedented UN economic
sanctions via a broad export ban that seeks to deprive North Korea of a third
of its revenues.

Mr Litwak, who has
previously described North Korea as a failed state with nuclear weapons, said
the most the US could probably hope for is that the country might feasibly halt
its nuclear programme as an interim step, rather than dismantle it altogether.

“A freeze would be a
diplomatic sweetspot,” he said.North Korea also appeared to dismiss any
possibility of negotiation with Washington, saying:

“The strategic weapons
that the DPRK manufactured at the cost of blood and sweat, risking everything,
are not a bargaining thing for getting acknowledgment from others.”

NEW HAVEN – Once again, the Chinese economy has defied the hand wringing of the nattering nabobs of negativism. After decelerating for six consecutive years, real GDP growth appears to be inching up in 2017. The 6.9% annualized increase just reported for the second quarter exceeds the 6.7% rise in 2016 and is well above the consensus of international forecasters who, just a few months ago, expected growth to be closer to 6.5% this year, and to slow further, to 6%, in 2018.

I have long argued that the fixation on headline GDP overlooks deeper issues shaping the China growth debate. That is because the Chinese economy is in the midst of an extraordinary structural transformation – with a manufacturing-led producer model giving way to an increasingly powerful services-led consumer model.

To the extent that this implies a shift in the mix of GDP away from exceptionally rapid gains in investment and exports, toward relatively slower-growing internal private consumption, a slowdown in overall GDP growth is both inevitable and desirable. Perceptions of China’s vulnerability need to be considered in this context.

This debate has a long history. I first caught a whiff of it back in the late 1990s, during the Asian financial crisis. From Thailand and Indonesia to South Korea and Taiwan, China was widely thought to be next. An October 1998 cover story in The Economist, vividly illustrated by a Chinese junk getting sucked into a powerful whirlpool, said it all.

Yet nothing could have been further from the truth. When the dust settled on the virulent pan-regional contagion, the Chinese economy had barely skipped a beat. Real GDP growth slowed temporarily, to 7.7% in 1998-1999, before reaccelerating to 10.3% in the subsequent decade.

China’s resilience during the Great Financial Crisis was equally telling. In the midst of the worst global contraction since the 1930s, the Chinese economy still expanded at a 9.4% average annual rate in 2008-2009. While down from the blistering, unsustainable 12.7% pace recorded during the three years prior to the crisis, this represented only a modest shortfall from the 30-year post-1980 trend of 10%. Indeed, were it not for China’s resilience in the depths of the recent crisis, world GDP would not have contracted by 0.1% in 2009, but would have plunged by 1.3% – the sharpest decline in global activity of the post-World War II era.

The latest bout of pessimism over the Chinese economy has focused on the twin headwinds of deleveraging and a related tightening of the property market – in essence, a Japanese-like stagnation.

Once more, the Western lens is out of focus. Like Japan, China is a high-saving economy that owes its mounting debt largely to itself. Yet, if anything, China has more of a cushion than Japan to avoid sustainability problems.

According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s national savings is likely to hit 45% of GDP in 2017, well above Japan’s 28% saving rate. Just as Japan, with its gross government debt at 239% of GDP, has been able to sidestep a sovereign debt crisis, China, with its far larger saving cushion and much smaller sovereign debt burden (49% of GDP), is in much better shape to avoid such an implosion.

To be sure, there can be no mistaking China’s mounting corporate debt problem – with nonfinancial debt-to-GDP ratios hitting an estimated 157% of GDP in late 2016 (versus 102% in late 2008). This makes the imperatives of state-owned enterprise reform, where the bulk of rising indebtedness has been concentrated, all the more essential in the years ahead.

Moreover, there is always good reason to worry about the Chinese property market. After all, a rising middle class needs affordable housing. With the urban share of China’s population rising from less than 20% in 1980 to more than 56% in 2016 – and most likely headed to 70% by 2030 – this is no trivial consideration.

But this means that Chinese property markets – unlike those of other fully urbanized major economies – enjoy ample support from the demand side, with the urban population likely to remain on a 1-2% annualized growth trajectory over the next 10-15 years. With Chinese home prices up nearly 50% since 2005 – nearly five times the global norm (according to the Bank for International Settlements and IMF global housing watch) – affordability is obviously a legitimate concern. The challenge for China is to manage prudently the growth in housing supply needed to satisfy the demand requirements of urbanization, without fostering excessive speculation and dangerous asset bubbles.

Meanwhile the Chinese economy is also drawing support from strong sources of cyclical resilience in early 2017. The 11.3% year-on-year gain in exports recorded in June stands in sharp contrast with earlier years, which were adversely affected by a weaker post-crisis global recovery. Similarly, 10% annualized gains in inflation-adjusted retail sales through mid-2017 – about 45% faster than the 6.9% pace of overall GDP growth – reflect impressive growth in household incomes and the increasingly powerful (and possibly under-reported) impetus of e-commerce.

Pessimists have long viewed the Chinese economy as they view their own economies – repeating a classic mistake that Yale historian Jonathan Spence’s seminal assessment warned of many years ago.

The asset bubbles that broke Japan and the United States are widely presumed to pose the same threat in China. Likewise, China’s recent binge of debt-intensive economic growth is expected to have the same consequences as such episodes elsewhere.

Forecasters find it difficult to resist superimposing the outcomes in major crisis-battered developed economies on China. That has been the wrong approach in the past; it is wrong again today.

If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.